An exclusive investigative report has revealed how a $4 million United Nation's climate programme impoverished and tortured Nigerian communities, such a thought-provoking eye opener.
A patch of forest in Akamkpa, Cross River State. The state holds over half of Nigeria's standing rainforest
Things were looking up for William Obio when he decided to invest more in his logging business. For the first time in years, his nine children and three brothers were eating well, and he could support his over half-a-dozen team of machine operators, saw men, scouts, and wood carriers.
Such success, rare in Owai, a heavily forested and impoverished community less than 20 kilometres from Nigeria’s southern border with Cameroon, emboldened Mr. Obio. He took a chance and purchased a small cassava crushing machine and got more saws.
“God answered our prayers; things really changed,” said the part-time pastor.
Everything indeed changed in 2008, Mr. Obio said, when the Cross River government imposed a sweeping ban on forest use in the state’s 18 local government areas, including Mr. Obio’s Akamkpa – where Owai is located.
Governor Liyel Imoke had said wealthy merchants, mostly from outside the state, were taking advantage of lax laws to deplete the state’s forest cover.
The site of more than half of Nigeria’s remaining rainforest, the governor warned, Cross River needed to save its green stock to boost investment and tourism. Under this plan, the state would become Nigeria’s pilot site for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), a United Nations climate change mitigation programme that offers payment to states and communities for conserving their forest.
For a state that had lost monthly federal payments to oil producing states, following the ceding of oil-rich Bakassi peninsula to Cameroon in 2008, the proposal drew wide support. Besides, Cross River’s forest cover had declined from 7,920 to 6,102 square kilometres between 1991 and 2008, according to figures from Nigeria’s Ministry of Environment.
In the years that followed, the government fiercely enforced the embargo and chased out local traders like Obio, seized wood, and raided timber markets. Officials also stopped locals from hunting game and fetching bush mango and afang – popular delicacies in the region.
As the new policy disrupted traditional livelihoods many forest communities relied on, the government failed to provide alternative means of support, despite making clear that promised benefits from REDD+ payments would take years to come.
Michael Eraye, Cross River State’s Commissioner of Environment told PREMIUM TIMES that the government did make efforts to equip those affected with new skills, but poor funding affected the plans. He said the government built roads in affected areas, as part of its compensation plans.
Salisu Dahiru, Nigeria’s UN-REDD Coordinator, said efforts to find affected communities and determine how their livelihoods are linked to the forest, were ongoing. But he acknowledged that training programmes had yet to commence nearly eight years after the first ban, and four years after the start of the REDD+ programme.
Meanwhile, only a few years after the REDD+ initiative got underway in Cross River State, Governor Imoke, who had once championed the programme, quietly began to back away even as the ban continued. In May 2015, days before leaving office after eight years as governor, Mr. Imoke told shocked officials that REDD+ did not return on investment.
“I got to the point when I felt that it was not worth my effort,” Mr. Imoke said, according to the UN-REDD National Programme Semi-Annual Report January to June 2015 edition. Two senior officials who attended the meeting confirmed the former governor made those remarks. They said the governor directed his comments at Odigha Odigha, head of the state forestry commission at the time.
The report said months before the meeting, state officials demonstrated diminishing interest in REDD+, and the ambitious programme began to stall.
The first phase, known as the Readiness Phase, is now set to end in December 2016, nearly two years later than originally intended. Local communities will have to wait much longer for REDD+ resource-based payments, if they ever come. While they wait, little to no help has come from the state.
A PREMIUM TIMES’ examination of Cross River State’s anti-deforestation and climate change mitigation programme, which began in 2008, shows how the implementation of an otherwise well-intentioned policy deprived forest-dependent communities of their primary source of livelihood. It also provides a glimpse into the abuse and policy missteps that characterised the government’s execution of the programme.
For this report, this newspaper reviewed relevant documents on the project and interviewed several state and national officials, community members and leaders, traders, civil society members, and officials of the United Nations’ REDD programme over a period of three months.
Living off the forest
Forests play an integral role in regulating the amount of carbon emissions in the atmosphere. When present, they absorb carbon emitted by human activity—an estimated 25 per cent of these emissions over the past four decades—and help moderate the effects of climate change. When lost through deforestation, they release carbon back into the atmosphere and are responsible for up to 20 per cent of global manmade carbon dioxide emissions.
REDD+ is a global mechanism designed to reward governments in developing nations for preserving forests and constraining the impacts of climate change. To date, REDD+ has pledged nearly US$ 10 billion to developing countries, with $4 million allocated for Nigeria’s National Programme, of which Cross River State is a pilot model.
The first formal steps taken by the Governor Imoke administration toward monetizing Cross River State’s vast forest resources began in October 2009, a year after the forest embargo went into effect. Mr. Imoke worked with the then Minister of the Environment, John Odey, a Cross River native, to apply to be part of REDD+.
In addition to joining the Governors’ Climate and Forest Task Force, based in the United States, Mr. Imoke attended COP 15 in Copenhagen later that year, where he announced efforts to protect Cross River’s tropical forests.
In April 2010, Nigeria became a UN-REDD partner country, and from then, followed through with a series of REDD+ programmes.
Despite such efforts, the government failed to provide economic relief for the local population and did not fully engage with them before and after the ban, those interviewed told PREMIUM TIMES.
Tony Attah, in charge of the Cross River forestry commission’s outreach programmes, acknowledged that the ban and initial phase of REDD+ were not well communicated. Despite initial missteps, he said that extensive community engagements were carried out by the state between January and August 2014.
Many environmentalists who support forest conservation, however, have taken issue with the REDD+ programme, blaming it for loss of indigenous land rights and branding it as property colonisation by developed nations. They also argue that the programme lacks mechanisms to ensure pledged payments reach affected people and are not pocketed by greedy politicians or other representatives.
They argue that forest-dependent communities like Mr. Obio’s Owai, who have yet to receive any payments years after the forest ban went into place, are made to pay more than their fair share for environmental clean-up, and for the pollution caused by developed countries.
“REDD is a dangerous eco-business,” said the NGO group, Environmental Rights Action, as Cross River State entered the early stages of preparing to implement the programme. “It enriches polluters and impoverishes forest community people who have conserved the forests over the years.”
Uncertain futures
The Cross River timber union has said thousands of its members and affiliate workers, lost their livelihood—some, allegedly, even their lives—after the ban. They include timber dealers, machine operators, saw men, scouts, and carriers.
“Our members lost out when the ban started, some died of shock. Many lost everything they had,” said David Essien, the head of Akim Timber Market union, the biggest timber market in the state.
Reliable statistics depicting such damage are hard to come by in the state, but studies conducted in the area paint a gloomy picture.
The Social Development Integrated Centre, a Port Harcourt-based policy analysis group, in a 2014 report on the impact of REDD in Cross River, concluded that “the move towards REDD has been made without any clear community development programme that addresses livelihoods and income generation alternatives for forest dependent communities”.
Before 2008, to harvest timber in Cross River, the state required loggers to pay between N20, 000 (US$102) and N50, 000 (US$254)—of which 70 per cent went to communities as royalty. Dealers were also required to plant five seedlings as replacement, and be cleared or “stamped” by forestry commission officials that harvested timber was mature.
The ban stopped the royalty and kept communities from harvesting wood even to build their homes, said Oyi Akama, the village head of Owai. Importantly, it kept many youth out of work.
Stephen Mbeh, head of nearby Oban town, told PREMIUM TIMES how a government task force twice seized timber he harvested to construct a home. He succeeded the third time after young people in the town helped ward off the enforcers. “This is our own oil. This is all we have, and even to cut mango at your backyard, we could not,”he said.
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